WHAT WE DISLIKED:

Introduction

While powerful flagship graphics cards may garner most of the buzz in the press, it’s often the lower-end affordable cards that can rake in the profits, not to mention being far more attainable to the average person who’s on a really tight budget yet still wants to do some light duty gaming.

AMD has made it clear that framerates aren’t the company’s primary goal, instead wanting to make affordable products that offer value gaming performance, which is arguably one of the most important criteria for gamers out there who may be hard-pressed to choose where to spend their hard-earned money.

As a result, today we’re focusing on two cards from HIS, a company we’re very familiar with, having seen many of their products in the past couple of generations in AMD cards. HIS typically produces cards with custom coolers and aggressive factory overclocks, but these two are a bit different. The R7 260X and R7 250X are budget-oriented cards for those with modest budgets and looking for some affordable gaming, and perhaps even something suitable for an HTPC setup.

I think perhaps you may be missing the point of a test setup for reviews. All graphics cards are tested on the same system setup, regardless of the cards’ capabilites. This ensures a fair and unbiased comparison for people to determine which is “better” amongst the various competing cards. We also use a high-end setup to avoid any possible bottlenecks, which would skew the results and hamper the objectivity of the testing. So, the purpose is not to rebuild every possible combination of systems out there, for various budgets; that’s an exercise in futility.

Excellent points BMfan. These cards are targeted to those on a tight budget, and such consumers are likely to be happy being able to play at all; they’re not looking for 60+ FPS at 1920+ resolution on Ultra settings. As mentioned as well, we use a high-end setup for objective testing purposes, and it seems you understand the rationale behind the issues with GPU testing and comparisons. Thanks for your comments and insight.

During the testing in this review a single 250x was able to get 30FPS at a slightly higher res than you will be using. The settings were also set to Ultra. At a lower res and settings you should be able to get decent FPS. Running them in Crossfire should gain you a bit more FPS. The only thing holding you back will be the 1GB frame buffer. The higher the res and detail the more Vram will be needed to avoid stuttering.